Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas Read Free Book Online Page B

as she could see. Not a flag of the United
States of America anywhere.
    She'd been directed by Margo to hand out flyers for a voter registration
meeting. She was to do this in the shadow of the Mississippi state capitol.
She thought Margo was joking. But there wasn't the slightest smile on
Margo's face. She thought of declining, of begging off, but knew how that would be perceived and talked about in the One Man, One Vote office.
Besides, Ramona had been standing there when the assignments were given
to the last group of volunteers, and she wasn't going to cop out in front of
her, or them.

    A police car with two officers pulled in across the street. She caught her
peach short-sleeved cotton dress, her pony-tailed hair, even her tight-lipped
fear reflected in the plate glass window of the shoe store. Celeste frosted a
smile on her face as her fear petrified.
    She'd been told to hand the flyers to Negroes and whites with no distinction. When a flyer was begrudgingly accepted or snatched, it got a
quick glance and a quicker toss into the city trash can, as if the flyer and the
message were contaminated. Negro people stepped wide of her, offering
furtive takes to passing whites that said, "I ain't in it." Margo wouldn't be
back to pick her up until noon so there was nothing to do but keep trying.
She shook off thoughts of Wilamena's simmering disdain, her assumed
superiority, as if every kind or giving gesture toward another human being
qualified as a favor that had to be reciprocated. Wilamena never got what
the gesture did for the person offering-not as something to lord over others, but as an expression of one's own humanity. Just like the graduation.
    Wilamena couldn't put herself out to attend her own children's graduations from high school, and yet thought it just fine to continue asking them
to come to New Mexico. Some people got it and some didn't. There was no
blessed community in required reciprocity, but there certainly was in just
flat-out giving. So many people had made the commitment, had put their
lives on the line. Wilamena had to be wrong.
    Already, Celeste had adapted to her Freedom Summer orientation
schedule. Classes in nonviolent philosophy and action every day. Drop to
the ground, protect your head, go into a ball. If the fire hoses come out, forget
it. There's no protection. Voter registration booster meetings were held every
night at local churches with speakers from the clergy and from the leadership of One Man, One Vote. The Mississippi State Constitution of i89o and
its strictures on Negro voting were featured at the meetings. The sermons,
the boosting part, were designed to keep the brethren riled up and raring
to go on the march toward enfranchisement. The brethren included the
volunteers. At the end of each meeting, the church body stood to sing
freedom song after freedom song, just like Margo said. Celeste garbled the
words, reading sometimes from a mimeographed sheet, trying to catch the passion of the more experienced summer volunteers, the dedication of
the locals.

    To calm herself on the pavement, she quietly hummed "We Shall Overcome," feeling more and more like a fanatic whose beliefs separated her
from the rest of the world. She spotted a suit-wearing white man coming
toward her and opened her face to respond to his queasy smile, thinking
this brave soul was about to break the barrier, to step up, take a flyer, and
maybe even have a conversation about what was going on in Mississippi.
She plastered some terrified version of love on her face to accompany her
limp smile. He zoomed by, grabbed the flyer, and hissed "Jiggaboo" in
her ear all in one seamless motion. She dropped a handful of flyers to the
pavement as she spun around to see him scrunch his flyer into a ball and
lob it gracefully into a trash can. He disappeared into the bustling morning
flow of pedestrians.
    Jiggaboo?A stinging rippled around the coils of her brain, igniting tenuous but